Lynnfield: Nehalem Goes Mainstream

Cut through the hedgerow of codenames that Intel carefully grows around its products and you’ll see few major differences separating the new Lynnfield chip from its high-end brother, Bloomfield. Sure, the new CPUs use a different socket called LGA 1156 and support slightly faster memory, but they’re remarkably similar to LGA 1366 processorsand, more importantly, substantially cheaper. Lynnfield, or Core i5 (that’s their official name), chips are the mainstream equivalent of the Core i7 chips, which were very fast and relatively expensive. Core i5 chips sell for as little as $199, and with performance that’s good enough for gamers, mainstream PCs just got a lot more interesting.

As Mark Hachman pointed out a couple of weeks ago, tech enthusiasts have to juggle dozens of codenames at any one time, and with this launch in particular it seems Intel has made the problem worse. The Intel representatives we recently spoke with showed off Lynnfield chips (based on the Nehalem microarchitecture) running in Kingsberg motherboards using Ibex Peak chipsets. To make matters worse, we also discussed the next-gen Clarkdale CPU, which contains the Westmere core and is again based on the Nehalem microarchitecture. That’s three code names for one CPU! Call it Nehalem, call it Lynnfield, or call it Core i5it’s one heck of a fast chip.

But for now, let’s focus on today’s launch. The newly debuted platform consists of three parts: the new Core i7-800 and Core i5-700 series Lynnfield processors, the Intel P55 Express chipset codenamed Ibex Peak, and a new crop of motherboards, including Intel’s offering, the DP55KG Extreme, codenamed Kingsberg. Let’s look at each in turnas well as a few competing motherboards from popular manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte, and some brand new PCs already using those parts.

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